Style

Four-Wheeled Future: How to Have a Carefree Road Trip, in Your Electric DeLorean

The Tesla Model S Performance juices up at one of the company’s solar-powered Supercharger stations in Hawthorne, California., Photograph by Brett Berk.

Busy cooks can develop Carpaccio Tunnel Syndrome, beauty-pageant participants are prone to Sparkle Motion Sickness, and science- and statistic-eschewing right-wingers often fall prey to Reality. But potential buyers of electric vehicles are most often dissuaded from pulling the purchase trigger by something called Range Anxiety, a DSM-5-approved fear of being stranded without go-juice.

This disorder isn’t just common among haters and amperphobes. We’re big boosters of the incipient electric-vehicle revolution, but in our recent time tooling around L.A. and Palm Springs in the Tesla Model S—a radical E.V. that can travel up to 265 miles on a charge, and garnered a spot on our year-end Top 5 list—we found ourselves constantly checking the charge-o-meter and wondering where we might find our next zap.

Of course, if we were to buy an electric car—whether it’s a Tesla, a Chevy Volt, or a DMC EV-Electric DeLorean—we would have a proper charger installed in our garage. That is, if we owned a garage. When we were in the desert, we ran a standard orange extension cord to the driveway from the house we were renting and eked out a few miles of charge each hour. But with our apartment in New York City on the sixth floor and our parking spot on the street, this might prove tedious and Rapunzel-y.

Obviously, there’s an app for all this. The folks at Tesla recommend Recargo and PlugShare, and their correlative dot-com-suffixed Web sites, for locating proximate, rapid, and functional charging stations. Our amateur fiddling with these—both of which could be accessed on the Model S’s giant, Web-enabled center console—led us, obviously, to the Waldorf Astoria’s La Quinta Resort, an elegant, 45-acre, 1920s Spanish-style compound, featuring 41 swimming pools, 23 tennis courts, and five golf courses. Here, while we toured the grounds, ate lunch, and watched our friends order multiple margaritas, our vehicle did its own heavy drinking from the spa’s E.V.-dedicated 220V socket. As it was, we downed just enough energy to make it back to Palm Springs, but if we’d added on a few hours on the courts and in one of the property’s 53 hot tubs, we could have chugged enough miles to get back to L.A.

Another option was the local Walgreens—and if you’ve ever walked or driven anywhere in America, you know that there’s one local to you. The chain has contracted with “comprehensive electric vehicle ecosystem” provider eVgo (E-vee-go) to place free or pay chargers in 800 of its urban locations. Most of these chargers are like the one we found at La Quinta, providing about 25–30 miles per hour of connection. But some feature high-speed chargers that can spark to this same amount in just 10 minutes. What’s in it for the drugstore? Well, eVgo spokesman Terry O’Day told us about “how dedicated E.V. drivers are to the retailers that offer fast charging stations.” With a CVS and a Rite Aid selling the same sunscreen and Fiddle Faddle right across the street, this functions as a useful means of differentiation.

In addition to drugstores—and supermarkets, restaurants, and airport parking lots—eVgo is partnering with owners of single-family homes and apartment buildings to create a holistic charging infrastructure. As with cell-phone plans, eVgo gives you the hardware—installing a free charger—in exchange for your signing a three-year, fixed-price contract. In Texas, where the company is based, this means you pay $89/month to cover all your home charging, as well as unlimited access to its retail quick-charging stations. To put it in perspective, that’s less than the cost of one fill-up on the Mercedes we were driving last week.

Not to be outdone, Tesla is creating its own charging infrastructure. These solar-powered “Supercharger” sites—designed and developed by company co-founder Elon Musk’s SolarCity subsidiary—turn sunlight into high-output current: we’re talking 150 miles of charge during your road trip’s 30-minute bathroom/coffee/lunch break. And they’re free to Model S drivers. We connected to the one at the company’s Hawthorne design center near LAX, but there are five other Superchargers in California to “enable the Las Vegas to Los Angeles to San Francisco to Lake Tahoe corridor,” Tesla spokesperson Shanna Hendriks told us.

Of course, these work only for current and future Tesla vehicles (the company’s stalker-ific Roadster can’t take such a big load) and only for those commuting on this lifestyle-specific route. But the plan, like everything on Musk’s to-do list, is estimably grandiose. (His SpaceX private rocket recently docked at the International Space Station.) “Last week, we opened two Superchargers in the Northeast to enable the route from New York City to Washington, D.C.,” Hendriks told us. “By next year, we plan to install Superchargers in high-traffic corridors across the U.S., enabling fast, purely electric travel from Vancouver to San Diego, Miami to Montreal, and Los Angeles to New York.”

What, if anything, is the downside to all of this emergent infrastructure? Well, following from eVgo’s cell-phone paradigm, every car company seems to be sticking with its own proprietary charger design, leaving us with ports that don’t fit every electric storm. The situation is only going to worsen, says our friend John Voelcker, editor of Green Car Reports, “now that the U.S. and German car-makers have settled on a separate, incompatible standard called S.A.E. combo.” And depending on where the juice in that cord comes from—filthy coal, fracked-up natural gas—your charge might be dirtier than a tankful of premium.

On the flip side, according to Voelcker, these new facilities may offer a remedy to our contemporary tendencies for distracted driving. “The superchargers all seem to be in places with 4G coverage, so you can play with your mobile device for the half-hour it takes to fast-charge. Of course,” he went on, “unless you’re in a Tesla, you’ll be doing this every 50 to 75 miles. That’s a lot of time to check your e-mail.”

Four-Wheeled Future: How to Have a Carefree Road Trip, in Your Electric DeLorean

The Tesla Model S drinks while we do, at the Waldorf-Astoria La Quinta Resort.

Photo: Photograph by Brett Berk.

One of eVgo’s 800 planned charging stations at Walgreens locations.

Photo: Courtesy of eVgo.

An eVgo charging station at a Houston mall, featuring a range of electric cars including (from right rear) a Chevy Volt, a Nissan Leaf, a Mitsubishi i-MiEV, a useless golf cart, and the awesome, all-electric DMC EV-Electric DeLorean.

Photo: Courtesy of eVgo.

Tesla’s current solar Supercharger locations.

Photo: Courtesy of Tesla.

Tesla’s ambitious plan for 100 solar Supercharger locations, by 2015.

Photo: Courtesy of Tesla.

The Tesla Model S drinks while we do, at the Waldorf-Astoria La Quinta Resort.

Photograph by Brett Berk.

One of eVgo’s 800 planned charging stations at Walgreens locations.

Courtesy of eVgo.

An eVgo charging station at a Houston mall, featuring a range of electric cars including (from right rear) a Chevy Volt, a Nissan Leaf, a Mitsubishi i-MiEV, a useless golf cart, and the awesome, all-electric DMC EV-Electric DeLorean.